How to Look at Year in Review Apple Music

It's December 1st, which for Spotify users, ways the annual tradition of the music streaming service's Spotify Wrapped roundup: customized, flashy infographics of the top songs, playlists, artists, and podcast that you lot've listened to over the concluding year, chock-full of data, mood boards, and just a sprinkling of judgment.

I, unfortunately, do not utilize Spotify. Instead, I pay Apple $x per month for Apple tree Music, Spotify'due south biggest competitor. And so while virtually everyone I know on Twitter and Instagram is spending the entirety of today putting their personal taste in music on smash, I get... a playlist of the songs that I listened to the almost this year.

This is fine.

Spotify has been eating Apple's lunch for years at present with Wrapped, which has practically get its own internet holiday each year. And yet, information technology took Apple 4 total years to even launch its bare-bones Replay feature, which debuted in 2019 and hasn't been meaningfully updated since. (I've been using kludged together Smart Playlists on iTunes for years to try to poorly replicate the Spotify experience.)

2021 is no exception, with Spotify offering what feels like its nearly lavish recaps yet. My married woman (who is a Spotify user) spent the morning showing off her bespoke playlist to me, which included (among other things) particularly curated songs for specific moods, rankings of where she placed amongst global Doja Cat listeners, a color-changing "audio aura," and an interactive quiz. All of it is designed to be shared and shown off on other social media platforms.

My wife's far cooler Spotify Wrapped recap.

And it'south not merely music listeners, either. Artists seem to honey Spotify Wrapped, as well, with their own customized recaps showing off how many millions of times their fans streamed their music around the globe.

It's not that Apple tree Music couldn't do its ain version of Wrapped; Apple certainly has the data, and I find information technology extremely hard to believe that the $ii.79 trillion company can't discover the space in its upkeep to task a team of designers and engineers into building a similar tool. Or perhaps it could try to buy Last.fm, which already does a whole bunch of music trends based on customers' listening habits, if information technology wanted to offload some of that work.

And there are plenty of reasons for Apple to do exactly that besides my almanac dose of social media FOMO: Apple has made no secret of its ambitions for recurring service acquirement to serve as a key role of its time to come going frontwards. And yet, instead of jumping on the easy marketing win and massive user goodwill that a more than robust replay feature could offer, year afterward year later on twelvemonth, Apple tree just chooses to do the absolute bare minimum.

Ah yes, Spotify Wrapped mean solar day, or every bit I similar to think of it "penalization for beingness an Apple Music user while everyone else gets to take fun with their music recaps" day.

— Chaim Gartenberg (@cgartenberg) December 1, 2021

Look at it another style: Spotify, every twelvemonth, manages to get millions of people to spend days posting algorithmically generated Spotify advertisements to every corner of their social media presences, without even offering any free giveaways or incentives. Why wouldn't Apple Music be trying to get a piece of that action?

Since I'grand an Apple Music user, you delight just imagine my Spotify Wrapped to exist whatever artists you think cool people mind to

— Monica Chin (@mcsquared96) December 1, 2021

It's not fifty-fifty similar Apple has to worry about angering Spotify by shamelessly ripping off one of its nearly popular features: Spotify already thinks Apple is a "ruthless bang-up" that monopolizes the App Store to favor its own services and has filed an antitrust complaint in the EU to that cease. Information technology's non like there's a good, healthy corporate relationship to ruin hither. If Instagram could shamelessly copy stories from Snapchat, Apple can figure out how to replicate its own version of Wrapped.

In fact, information technology's increasingly surprising year afterwards twelvemonth that seemingly no one is copying Spotify's absurdly pop data visualizations. With a few exceptions like Microsoft's recent 20th anniversary Xbox retrospective, there are all the same virtually no takers on following Spotify'south atomic number 82 here. Where's Netflix'south flashy await back at the shows yous binged over the year, or PlayStation's deep dive into how many hours you spent trying to shell Pride and Joy Prototype in Final Fantasy VII Remake? The closest comparison I can remember of is Goodreads' "Your Year In Books," which as well functions more as a direct listing than the comprehensive experience that Spotify has created here.

But for now, I'm once once again spending Dec filled with envy as my Spotify-using friends get to prove off all their favorite songs, left hoping with increasingly futile optimism that maybe Apple Music volition effigy things out adjacent.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/1/22812079/apple-music-year-in-review-spotify-wrapped-social-media

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